We Have To Talk About Harvey

My children have been reading through a trove of their father’s childhood comics, which includes a number of titles from the old Harvey Comics imprint. You’ll remember Harvey — home to Richie Rich, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Wendy the Good Little Witch, Little Lotta, Little Dot, Playful Little Audrey, and their friends. Casper and Richie were childhood favorites of mine, but I ended up with a surprising number of Wendy, Lotta, Dot, and Audrey comics in part because a friendly bagboy at the grocery store where I bought my comics as a little boy used to give me issues left over at the end of the month, and in part because I was such a voracious comics reader that I would buy almost anything sold at garage sales. I was not such a Little Dot fan, for example, but I read those comics, because … well, why not? I read every comic I could get my hands on.

My two youngest children love Harvey comics, and read them constantly. This weekend, I picked up some of my worn, tattered copies from the early 1970s, and flipped through them. They’re pretty awful. I mean, the art is engaging and pleasant, and for me, quite nostalgic. But the stories are really lame. I know, I know, I’m 40 years removed from the six-year-old child under my roof who is now reading them. Still … wow. Richie and Casper aren’t all that bad, but the minor Harvey characters, like the girls? Blecch (to use a good old Mad magazine word, which came to mind again when the aforementioned six year old daughter started walking around the house saying, “Bletch.”)

Harvey World is just weird. Take Little Lotta, an obese, compulsive eater who happens to be as strong as an ox. At the risk of sounding like a fourth-rate stand-up comedian, what’s up with that? I realize now that Little Dot had OCD, hence her obsession with polka dots. Even so, check out this snarky analysis of a Little Dot storyline. Excerpt:

That little sack of radioactive dust loves you too, Dot. It loves you so much that it’s sending out little rays of love that are gettin’ it on with your cell structure, and soon that love will present itself to you in new and wonderful ways. And afterwards they will bury you in a lead-lined coffin somewhere in a government approved facility.

And think, if you can stand to, about the staff meeting at Harvey at which it was decided to create a new friend for Richie: a child stand-up comedian named Jackie Jokers. Here’s another of those snarky analyses, though be warned, this one drops the f-bomb. Excerpt:

But really, how appropriate is it for a ten-year-old kid to be going to nightclubs every night? They don’t even allow children into most nightclubs, because it’s filled with drunk people. Which I guess is just as well, since you’d have to be pretty damn drunk to find a tux-clad little kid telling knock-knock jokes suitable entertainment. Still, I’m almost positive child labour laws are being broken here.

I had that Jackie Jokers issue from which this is taken. Never was a Jackie fan, even though as a kid, I was entirely undiscriminating when it came to Harvey world. If you couldn’t sell Jackie Jokers to me, then you couldn’t sell Jackie Jokers to anybody. Which is no doubt why he never took off.

I am happy to say, however, that until encountering the Stupid Comics site, I was innocent of the existence of Billy Bellhops. Where in the world could this character possibly go?

Let’s not even consider the utter bizarreness of the Richie Rich comics, which celebrate the massive wealth of a little boy, upon whom it rains jewels and dollar bills and things. I imagine there has been many a turgid Marxist analysis of what the Richie comics said about the American character, written by childhood Richie fans who grew up to pursue master’s degrees in English literature. Richie was by far my favorite Harvey character, because he lived out a childhood fantasy: What if you had all the money in the world? It’s a kind of super-power.

Finally, watching my little ones read Harvey comics got me to thinking about how I acquired comics as a kid. They were sold on the shelf at our local grocery store, and at the drugstore. When did that end, I wonder? If Harvey were still around, there would be no place in town to buy them, or to buy any comic. Where do kids who don’t have comic book stores in their town get comics? Do they still?

Up next: considering the world of Archie, including the theory that Jughead is a closet case who crudely sublimates his sexual anxieties into compulsive eating.

I loved Archie comics, and occasionally I’ll still pick up one of those classic/collectible Archie digests if I see one at the gas staion or where ever.

An interesting footnote – in the late 60s/early 70s, one of the Archie staff artists Al Hartley (who took over the strip after Dan DeCarlo) had a nervous breakdown/born-again experience, and started packing the strips with all sorts of ham-handed right-wing/Fundamentalist Christian propaganda. I remember reading some of these as a kid and while I didn’t know exactly what was going on, I do remember thinking it all felt wrong and weird and creepy.

My own 3 comic-book reading kids (16, 13 and 8) get their comics delivered in graphic novel form as gifts from my brother for birthdays and Christmas; on loan from the used bookstore my husband works manages; and, in the case of my 13 year old, an online manga-inspired strip appropriate for girls that age. My husband gets free tickets to the local comic convention (his company has a booth) and they tag along.

All my kids love comic books. I’m glad. But they can’t go down to the 7-11 and buy 30 cent comics the way I did with my friends. It’s an expensive hobby now and we’d rely completely on the library if not for my brother who’s decided to be comic book uncle, and my husband bringing books home on loan. 35 years ago, for 30 cents, we could go to a neighborhood convenience store and try a new story without a big investment. Now you need enough money to buy a real book, and someone to drive you to a bookstore. Too bad.

Never heard of half this stuff! I tried to get into comics in middle school and was sort of into the Simpsons comics for a while, but I had to very snidely ask a friend to explain a couple years ago “OK why is a graphic novel something other than a glorified comic book?”

Can’t let this go without recalling two great Simpsons references to Harveyworld “While in rehab, the role of Bart was played by his good friend Richie Rich . . . . don’t have a cow mother!!” – and of course Alan Moore singing “oh Little Lulu I love you-Lu just the same.”

The newstand distributors didn’t like comics (took up a lot of space but had small profit margins compared to magazines) and the superhero comic companies didn’t like the newstand distributors (unsold copies get returned, putting all of the publishing cost risks on the comic producers). So comics moved to direct-order specialty stores in the 80′s, although the process got started in the late 70′s, I believe.

The large family-oriented comics (Archie, Disney) stuck around in the grocery store, mainly in digest-sized books displayed in check-out lines. Although I’m not sure that they’re still there. I haven’t seen them recently, but then I haven’t been looking, either.

Kids who don’t have a local store (which is probably most kids; the comics industry cratered in the late 90′s) can mail-order comics (Mile High Comics in CO has been doing that for decades, for example) or, more likely, read them online or download them.

I’m a year or two younger than you and I, too, still have all my comics. I have a good number of Harvey titles and might just crack open that box when I return home tonight.

To answer your last questions, I think it comes down to a couple of things. One, with the emergence in the 1980s of other forms of entertainment (video games, more cartoons, cable TV), comics started to lose thier core audience. Two, the emergence of comic book stores and the concept of collecting for collecting’s sake started leeching away readers from the 7-Elevens and grocery stores (and their glorious spinner racks), eventually leading to the general stores cancelling comics altogether. Three, comics changed in the mid-1980s with the publication of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, for example. From here on out, comics got “mature,” which is code for “more violent.” As the readership shrank, cover prices went up to compensate and storylines started catering to the remaining audience: teenagers and young adults who could afford the comics and didn’t mind the violence and, in fact, wanted more of it. Comics, once thought of as kiddie books, gained recognition and respect as an art- and storytelling form, but lost young readers. Nowadays, there’s hardly an entry point for young readers. There are comics aimed at the young–DC makes some, Disney and Pixar–but the cover prices still remain outside of allowance territory. Back in the day, $2 of allowance could nab you 5-6 titles. Now, $2 doesn’t get you one. Perhaps digitial comics–my only method of reading them now–can bring prices down and bring back some titles kids would want to read and a means for the young to get and read them.

No commentary on Harvey Comics is complete without a mention of “Playful Obsession,” Dan Clowes’s brilliant parody of the Harvey troupe. Characters include “L’il Octagon,” “Obesity Hopkins,” and “Gregg” the neurotic spectre.

But I’m afraid that any further personal smears against my most beloved of childhood comic-book heroes, the venerable Forsythe P. Jones III, would result in a personal Dreher boycott of no less than two, perhaps even three days.

Scott S says: “So comics moved to direct-order specialty stores in the 80′s, although the process got started in the late 70′s, I believe.”

Actually, the early 70′s. See the Wikipedia entry for the late Phil Seuling, who’s been called the “Father of the Direct Market.”

You can still find Marvel and DC comic books in the magazine sections of some supermarkets and magazine shops. Some of them even still have the old-fashioned spinning metal racks.

The comic book specialty shops were especially hard on the companies that didn’t specialize in superheros, such as Harvey, Disney and Archie. Initially, the shops focused almost exclusively on superhero comics, with Warren and Heavy Metal and the remaining Underground publishers being the outliers in the more adventurous stores. As the direct market grew, independent companies and self-publishing creators started to gain access to the shops. Many of them also published superhero comics, or fantasy and sword & sorcery ones, or parodies of the above (Conan the Barbarian, meet Cerebus the Aardvark). Booms and busts followed, and eventually folks were talking about the direct market being just another ghetto, with bookstore distribution the ultimate goal and legitimizer of the artform.

Artistically, while I freely admit to nostalgia for the better comic books of my youth, the field of graphic novels or literature has probably never been better than the last decade or so.

I respectfully disagree that the quality of the comics have improved. When comics were more or less aimed at kids, the field was awash in card carrying geniuses – the aforementioned Barks, Walt Kelly, C.C. Beck, Jack Cole, Kirby, Kurtzman and Eisner. If you want to see an underground cartoonist get enthusiastic, talk about these old-timers to Robert Crumb or Art Spiegelman. Starting in the mid-Eighties, comics became heavy and grim. Humorists need not apply. The result, usually, was work with all the pretensions of the would-be literati and little of the joy that accompanies the mature artist. Reading them, I felt like someone who had hoped to enjoy Duke Ellington and instead got saddled with the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Actually, I found the basic premise of Richie Rich to be conceptually extremely innovative. Mr. Dreher said it best: wealth as a superpower.

Think about it: superheroes from Superman to The Flash and Green Lantern (my two personal favorites) relied on physical powers. Professor Xavier and Batman relied on their minds (and excellent minds they were) to resolve issues. But in all those cases, the individual superheroes had their powers as part of their physical beings. Richie Rich didn’t. His characteristic power was economic, and what other superhero had that ? (Batman doesn’t count; his mind was his primary weapon.)

And as long as we’re talking about unique abilities, how about that Flaming Carrot ?

Well, the quality has improved. Just maybe not the qualities that you value. The production values are orders of magnitude beyond anything printed in my childhood. The paper stock, the art, the colors, the lettering that we see today would be unimaginable 25 years ago. Of course, so would the price…

Trying to apply labels like “heavy and grim” to an entire industry (even one with such genre diversity issues as American comic books) is fairly pointless. In the superhero genre (the bulk of the market), there are grim titles and there are light-hearted titles. Outside of the superheroes, you have just about every disposition under the sun. Geniuses flourish in both settings.

Rod, I have a suggestion for you – pick up Bone: Out from Boneville by Jeff Smith and share it with your kids. It’s a humorous and touching fantasy tale that is masterfully done. Smith’s wiki page describes the series thusly:

“Smith published… Bone between 1991 and 2004, blending influences from artists and writers such as Walt Kelly, Carl Barks, and J. R. R. Tolkien… In 2004, when Cartoon Books released a ‘mammoth’ one-volume black and white collection of the entire nine-volume series, Time critic Andrew Arnold called Bone ‘the best all-ages graphic novel yet published.’”

I’m embarrassed to think about how many great works of literature are still familiar to me mainly from the Classics Illustrated comic book version.

I loved Classics Illustrated … had I not read those as a kid, I would have struggled a lot more when I had to read them again in high school and college, e.g. Call of the Wild, War of the Worlds, Moby Dick, etc.

Speaking of Cerebus the Aardvark… there’s a CerebusTV online show that has Cerebus creator and indie comics pioneer Dave Sim (whose eccentric camera presence is compelling and unusually entertaining, given his cultic status in the field) and others hosting hands-on creation of comics – and interviews with the in-figures of the current and past comics world. There’s an episode upcoming with Cerebus co-creator Gerhard, who’s also branched out into illustrated children’s books. There’s also progress on an animated movie and zillions of animated transitions produced by some major Hollywood animators. So far, there have been well over a hundred slickly produced shows at http://Cerebus.TV…

Having grown up in the mid-90′s to early 2000′s, I’m now looking back on all the old Goosebumps and Ghosts of Fear Street books I used to love and wondering what the heck I was thinking. Ditto, to a lesser extent, with some aspects of Animorphs.

“Well, the quality has improved. Just maybe not the qualities that you value.”

That is one of the most profound concepts someone needs to understand whenever they’re critically evaluating anything.

It’s become kind of a thing lately to refer to this era as “the golden age of television” because of the rise of shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, etc. All that is, though, is equating quality with a particular type of storytelling. And, of course, it also ignores the megaton load of crap in television today, crap which I think is also most socially and emotionally destructive than the crap of previous times.

JoeMerl, I grew up the same way, exception with the addition of The Baby-Sitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High.

Looking back on what I read as a little kid, especially as a homeschooling mom reading books aloud to my kids, is how evenly split my choices were between really, really terrible dreck and truly good books.

The bad stuff was stuff only an indiscriminate child could stand, the literary equivalent of Lick’m Stix; the good stuff was stuff that is so good that even children could read and understand it. I still reread some of those books, and enjoy them.

The most mediocre writing is in adult fiction, where writer and readers are both willing to pretend garbage is tasty.

And I am very fond of comic book versions of classic stories; why should anyone be embarrassed that a story told via two media (verbal and visual) is twice as effective as a story told in only one medium? We use classics comic books as part of our classical curriculum at home. They’re great hooks to hang further refined knowledge on.

Random tangent on uranium and its cousins. Until 1972 Fiesta ware used uranium oxide in the glaze and the stuff will make a Geiger counter make a fair bit of noise. But it’s not really all that dangerous because uranium has a long half life and is embedded within the glaze.

Coleman lantern mantles used to use thorium which is also radioactive. This always seemed more dangerous to me because the thorium seems more likely to be inhaled where it can damage the lungs. Thorium is actually hard to get a hold of now because it can be turned into uranium in a few nuclear reactor. So nonproliferation measures have been taking it off the market.

Radium which is even worse used to be used in quack patent medicine. Ingested radium gets lodged in the bone where it can cause cancer.

Tl;dr people used to be fairly sanguine about radioactivity, but now we’re probably too uptight.

Did you know that during the postwar years, in Casper’s heyday, it had an annual circulation of 36,000,000 copies?

( wiki): Casper was created in the late 1930s by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo, the former devising the idea for the character and the latter providing illustrations. Intended initially as the basis for a 1939 children’s storybook, there was at first little interest in their idea. When Reit was away on military service during the Second World War before the book was released, Oriolo sold the entire rights to the book to Paramount Pictures’ Famous Studios animation division for 200 USD.

While Casper quickly became a multi-million-dollar industry, Reit never received a cent.